41

Any nation participating in the international division of labor necessarily derives an economic advantage greater than if it was in a situation of self-sufficiency. This is the fundamental, normative message of all the theoretical approaches that have tried to understand the foundation of exchanges between countries. Protectionism is therefore often condemned by economists who see it as a brake on international movements of goods and services that is responsable for blocking growth and the rising of employment and livings standards. The issue at stake today concerning the gains and inequalities that nations and populations really derive from globalization suggests reopening the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte whose contribution is no longer mentioned by any school of economic thought. In the case of a closed economy in particular, he severely criticized the economists who advocated either free trade or protectionism. Fichte believed that the advances in metaphysics should be applied to real life. This is the reason why his book contains of the first doctrines of state socialism. The state of globalization today surely gives a impetus to an approach now forgotten by most economists. Codes JEL: B1, B14, B17, B31, F51.